Various types of software development applications exist that software developers may use to develop software. An integrated development environment (IDE) is a type of software development application that contains several development tools in one package. An IDE may include tools such as a source code editor (“code editor”), a build automation tool, and a debugger. Examples of IDEs include Eclipse™ developed by Eclipse Foundation of Ottawa, Canada, ActiveState Komodo™ developed by ActiveState of Vancouver, Canada, IntelliJ IDEA developed by JetBrains of the Czech Republic, Oracle JDeveloper™ developed by Oracle Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., NetBeans developed by Oracle Corporation, Codenvy™ developed by Codenvy of San Francisco, Calif., Xcode® developed by Apple Corporation of Cupertino, Calif., and Microsoft® Visual Studio®, developed by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
Many development tools and programming languages enable program code to be generated that includes synchronous and asynchronous operations. Synchronous processes/operations have to complete before the rest of the program code can continue execution. Asynchronous processes/operations do not have to complete before the rest of the program code can continue execution. In particular, if a program statement performs an operation that has to be waited on for completion before program execution can continue, that program statement is considered to be performed synchronously. If a program statement performs an operation that does not have to be waited on for completion before program execution can continue, that program statement is considered to be performed asynchronously. As such, asynchronous operations enable more efficient execution of program code.
A programming language may include keywords that designate operations for asynchronous operation. For instance, in the C# programming language, the “async” keyword is used to designate an asynchronous method that generates a task as a result, and program execution can continue until the “await” keyword is encountered. The “await” keyword is used to retrieve the result of the task when the asynchronous method is eventually complete, and once the result is returned, program execution may continue. Other programming languages such as Scala, Python, Go, and JavaScript, may use the keywords “async” and “await” in a similar fashion as C#, and/or may use other keywords in any suitable fashion to designate asynchronous code and to indicate tasks to be awaited on.
In asynchronous programming, the position in the program code for the “await” (or similar) keyword in the program code can have a significant impact on how efficiently the program code executes, including altering the running time of the code drastically.